Mom, stop!" I said, as she smoothed my hair and reminded me not to rush the opening bars of my solo. I took a deep breath and walked quickly onto the stage.
And then I turned, and a spotlight came on so bright that I took a step back from it. My whole body seemed to go numb, and when the applause that had greeted me ended, my head felt squeezed by the silence.
"Fräulein? "the conductor whispered.
I nodded automatically. Yes, I am ready.
But I wasn't.
From the corner of my eye, I saw his baton's upbeat set a tempo and then swoop low, and behind me the orchestra's strings swept into the beginning measures of a Vivaldi concerto.
I raised my violin and fixed in my mind how my first notes should sound. I would play them just the way I had when I'd won the young artists competition that brought me here to Germany.
One more measure ... there ... Now!
I pulled my bow in a quick downstroke and heard a discordant tone tear out raw and wrong.
That's what I keep remembering How once I'd played that note so badly, there was no way to get it back. And how that one mistake led to another and another—a missed accent, a hurried rest beat, an odd angle to my bow arm. One off note after another after another; after another.
Somehow my hands, on their own, played to the concerto's end: played decently through the easy parts when I should have been preparing for the trouble spots and wasn't; faltered through the hard sections with only what my fingers remembered and nothing of what I needed to add from my head and my heart.
When the orchestra finally stopped playing and I turned back to the conductor; I couldn't meet his eyes.
"Well, fräulein," he said. "So."
Frederik Bottner stared out at South Dakota farmland that looked as lonely as he felt and wished he had his parents to decide for him. Although if he still had his parents, he wouldn't be facing this decision at all. Uncle Conrad, who was a professor of music in Germany, wouldn't have written him, and Uncle Joe...
Frederik remembered how his parents had smiled when Uncle Johann's first letter from his new home in Montana arrived last January. How they laughed at the way he signed his name "Joe" and shook their heads at how he urged them farther west to take up a place near him.
He wrote, "I've found a mountain valley where trees scent the air like in the old country, and wind doesn't sand away a body's skin."
Leave South Dakota? they asked. Where they had so much? They were used to the wind.
The letter stayed on the table for days, though, drawing Frederik's eyes and setting him to dreaming about mountain country while he studied or worked or practiced the violin his father had begun teaching him to play. From the start, Frederik had shown a skill that alternately pleased and frustrated his father:
"Frederik! Give attention," Heinrich Bottner would say. Then he'd adjust Frederik's hold on the instrument. "One day you're going to want to play this properly, and what if you have no one to teach you?"
"Father," Frederik asked during one of his lessons, "do you think you might ever consider moving?"
"I think you should attend to what you're doing!"
"Yes, sir," Frederik answered, but his mother took the violin and handed it to his father.
"Husband," she said, "if you want us to enjoy this, then you play it. Our son will learn music when he's ready." Her eyes teased. "Frederik, your father is going to play now. We must give attention!"
In Frederik's house on the harsh prairie, his father's violin playing was the one thing besides sleep that brought work to a stop Even his mother's hands sat idle in her lap, not knitting or stitching, when his father's violin sang above the wind.
But that was last January, the first month of 1905.
In March, as snow gave way to mud and the barnyard became a quagmire of thawing manure, Frederik's mother came down with typhoid. Heinrich Bottner's violin stayed silent during his wife's last days, as he sat by her bedside endlessly repeating, "Gott im himmel... Dear Gott im himmel." And a few months later; still preoccupied with grief; he lost his own life in a careless accident.
"With the help of a church pastor, Frederik wrote his uncles of Heinrich's death. And now both had sent back invitations for Frederik to live with them.
Uncle Joe wrote, "I share your grief; nephew. But come! Montana is a fine place with a lot of opportunities for an able young man."
A pastor translated the letter Uncle Conrad sent from Munich. "I have a son who is also fourteen," Conrad Bottner wrote. "You would be company for him and me, and if you have your father's talent as a musician, I will teach you violin as I'm teaching my son."
Frederik hardly knew what to make of an uncle who, given all he could have written about, offered violin lessons. Or did Uncle Conrad guess that along with missing his family, Frederik missed the music they'd shared? Was that what he was offering? Music?
But to leave everything familiar and start an entirely different life so far away ... And to go with no assurance that things would work out...
Of course Frederik wouldn't have any assurances going to Montana, either but neither would he be running quite so far into the unknown.
He looked at the letters in his hand, wishing they could tell him if one choice or the other would be a mistake.... wondering how, and when, he would know if he chose right.